Re:Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere
by Irregardless on Thursday February 14, 2013 @03:50PM
(#5222163)
It's possible I've missed some setting somewhere in the tangled web of menus, but I'm fairly certain the data is lost in the case of both those conversions.
For example: Type 09-2012 into a cell and hit Enter. It will probably turn into Sep-12 (or some other variation depending on your default date settings). If you convert that to Text or General, it turns into 41153 -- the number of days since 1/1/1900.
Excel recognizes all dates from 1/1/1900 through 12/31/9999, so it happily converts anything from 01-1900 to 12-9999 into a date. You can create a function to convert them back, but it would have to be based on the assumption that the format was originally ##-#### (which you may or may not know for certain depending on where the spreadsheet is coming to you from).
For example: Type 09-2012 into a cell and hit Enter. It will probably turn into Sep-12 (or some other variation depending on your default date settings). If you convert that to Text or General, it turns into 41153 -- the number of days since 1/1/1900.
Excel recognizes all dates from 1/1/1900 through 12/31/9999, so it happily converts anything from 01-1900 to 12-9999 into a date. You can create a function to convert them back, but it would have to be based on the assumption that the format was originally ##-#### (which you may or may not know for certain depending on where the spreadsheet is coming to you from).